A storage apparatus is an apparatus including a storage medium such as a hard disk drive (hereinafter, “HDD”) or a solid state drive (hereinafter, “SSD”) and providing a storage area for data to be processed by an application and other programs running on a host computer or the like, and is also referred to as a disk subsystem.
In recent years, there has been an increasing demand that storage apparatuses should achieve further power saving, space saving, higher-density packaging, and cost down for manufacturing and maintenance. A power failure of a storage apparatus is a serious failure that may lead to a system down in a data center or the like which is required to operate continuously with high reliability. In order to surely and quickly detect and then deal with such a power failure, a configuration has been employed in which a dedicated power supply monitor circuit is provided to a drive control board for an HDD, and is coupled to a control processor in a disk controller or the like with a dedicated interface (wiring), for example.
This configuration provided with the dedicated power supply monitor circuit and the dedicated interface, however, cannot sufficiently meet the foregoing demand, for example, for achievement of higher-density packaging, and cost down for manufacturing.
In this respect, Patent Literature (PTL) 1 proposes a configuration employed in a power control device including an HDD having a plurality of Fibre Channel interface ports, an HDD drive unit having a plurality of Fibre Channel controllers each including a Fibre Channel interface to the HDD and a Fibre Channel control interface, and an HDD control logic unit having a plurality of HDD control logics for controlling read/write accesses to the HDD. In this configuration, each of the Fibre Channel controllers includes a power supply control circuit for controlling a power supply of the HDD drive unit by using a Fibre Channel control interface control signal supplied from each of the HDD control logics to a corresponding one of the Fibre Channel control interfaces.